Let's say you have just downloaded your images from your digital camera andyou're ready to preview them here in Adobe Bridge. I would like to show how todo that now. Now let's go ahead and in Adobe Bridge with our exercise files visiblehere in the Content panel, double-click on the catalog images folder. And herewe have all of our catalog images inside of the Content panel. Okay that's thecenter panel here inside of Adobe Bridge. You can see all of the imagethumbnails. Now these are the images that we're going to be working with.Now the first I want to show you how to deal here is to change the size of thethumbnails inside of this panel.

Notice that down here we have this slider. I can drag it to the left or to theright and as I do it increases or decreases the size of those thumbnails. So if you want to view more thumbnails at a time, drag to the left and the furtheryou drag the smaller they get until you can fit just about everything inside ofthe window but they are very, very tiny-tiny.Notice that as you do so you also lose the file name underneath. Automaticallyit does that, once you reach at a certain point. I'm going to drag to the rightagain to increase the size of the thumbnails. I kind of like to keep themusually in a three column or maybe a four column format. It's just enough for me.

If you wanted to just focus on these thumbnails here and you don't want tobe bothered by the side panels, you can hide the side panels in order to fitmore thumbnails on your screen and you click on this double sided arrow overhere on the left the bottom left. That's the Show/Hide Panels tab. Click on thatand now we're just focusing on the thumbnails. And that's sometimes a good wayto work. Especially when you are just working with images right now.Not information about them.Okay the next thing I would like to show you how to do is actually selectimages from within this Content panel. Because before you can do anything with them, before you can open them up in Elements and apply adjustments to them,you have to select them first. To select an image inside of the Content panelin Bridge all you need to do is just click on the thumbnail and you will seea little highlight appear around the image. Click on it and it's selected.

All right if you want to select multiple images there is two different waysthat you can do that. If you would like to select some images that are next toeach other that are next to each other you can click one to select it, holddown the Shift key, select one that a little further one that's a little furtherdown in the list and it will add it to the selection and in addition it willalso add all of the images in between. Okay, so we select it multiple adjacentimages at once by Shift-clicking.You can also add to a selection by holding down the Command key and in doing soyou can select individual images that are not adjacent okay. So I'm doing thatnow holding down the Command key and clicking on random images in here in orderthem to my selection. So it's very important to understand how to select imageshere inside of the Content panel. That's how can choose which image is you'regoing with inside of Elements.

All right. Something else I want to show you how to do is to show differentinformation or more information underneath of the thumbnails. If you go underyour Bridge Preferences, bring that up, notice over here we have in theThumbnails panel, you have to click over here where it says Thumbnails.Here this area that says Details. It says Additional Lines of Thumbnail Metadata.Metadata is information that stored inside of the file. Now we can choose todisplay some of that information that exists inside of these files, underneaththe thumbnail. Right now all we're seeing is the name of the file. If wewanted to, wee could choose to show the date created and I think this isprobably the most useful of all of the available options in here. A lot oftimes people like to view their images by the date they were shot. Okay?And sort them that way inside of a Content panel. That something you can do usingthe controls in the Filter panel. If I click OK, I now can see the name of theimage and also the date and time that it was taken with a digital camera.

All right, let's go ahead and show these again. Then in the Filter panel, whichby default displayed over here, if I were to choose Sort By Date Created asoppose to Sort By Filename, which is currently what we are viewing, that'sgoing to change the display here and I can also flip this little arrow aroundto change it to descending order. Now what I have here at the top of theContent panel are the images that are the most recent and then they work theirway down backwards in time as you scroll down. And that's sometimes a nice way to work.

All right if were to go ahead and hide this information again by clicking thisbutton in the lower left. Focus on the thumbnail, let's say we like having thatinformation but for now we just want to focus on the images themselves. We cango under the View menu and we can choose Show Thumbnail Only.All right, so now we're just viewing the images. So this makes it sort of morelike a light box type of presentation. Sometimes that's a useful way to chooseimages to work with as well. All right something else that we can do is chooseto view details. Right in here we're going to see individual images and next tothe image, lots of information about the image itself.

You can see in here we have got not just the name and the date created but alsomodified, the size of the image, the document type, some camera settings;the dimensions and the resolution, the color profile that is embedded inside of it,the author and the copyright. And if you remember from watching the movie whereI downloaded images from camera, you can actually enter this information asyou're downloading. So it's nice to be able to access that here as well.All right so that's another way that you can view your images here inside ofBridge. I'm going to go back to the As Thumbnails. All right, so now that weknow how we can preview our images in Bridge after we download them from ourcamera, now we can open them up in Elements and start working with them andmaking adjustments to our images.

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Author

Released

9/29/2008

In Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac Essential Training, Ted LoCascio teaches casual photographers how to organize, edit, and share their digital image libraries using this powerful software package from Adobe. He tours the included Adobe Bridge application, used for importing and organizing photographs, and explores every feature of Elements itself. He demonstrates how to navigate the Elements workspace, which is used to correct and improve images, combine them into projects, and produce slideshows, photo books, web galleries, and more. Ted also explains how to get the most out of each editing mode, and shares tips for correcting, retouching, and sharpening photographs. Example files accompany the course.